‘Must I seize every opportunity?’ Complicity, confrontation and the problem of researching (anti-) fatness

Abstract

This paper draws on the experiences of two researchers working to develop critical accounts of fatness with very different research participants – town planners and English Channel swimmers. Drawing across our encounters with these different participants, we explore the ‘doing’ of critical research through attending to the embodied encounters which take place in the ‘field’. In so doing, we reflect on moments where we have both, as part of the research encounter, not only found ourselves simply in fat-phobic contexts, but also effectively complicit in those contexts in our roles as interlocutors. In this paper, we explore the tensions inherent in those encounters for us (in all our multiple social, professional and embodied subjectivities), and ask what attending to these embodied confrontations (or the avoidance of confrontation) might mean for the critical research process – both in terms of the impact on practice and outputs of research for individual researchers and the participants with whom they are working. In doing so, we focus on what attention to the research encounter adds to debates about ‘impact’ in social science, about the doing of scholar-activism and about the role of the researcher’s body in the research encounter.

Keywords:

• obesity
• impact
• methodology
• body
• activism
• swimming
• planning

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) for funding the two projects on which this paper is based, and the seminar series which facilitated our collaboration: ‘Becoming a Channel swimmer: identity and embodiment in an extreme sporting subculture’ [RES-000-22-4055]; ‘Designing out fatness: the built environment in anti-obesity policy’ [RES-000-22-3780]; and ‘Fat Studies and Health At Every Size: bigness beyond obesity seminar series’ [RES-451-26-0768]. Bethan would like to thank Prof. Jon Coaffee (Co-I) and Dr Lee Crookes (RA) who worked on the ‘Designing out fatness’ project with her. We would both like to thank our co-organizers, and those who attended the seminar series for insightful comments on, and discussion of, papers which helped inform this article. Thanks also to the editorial team and anonymous reviewers at Critical Public Health for comments on earlier versions of this paper. Finally, we are both indebted to our respective research participants for giving us the time to share experiences and accounts of importance to our research.

Notes

1. http://www.ref.ac.uk/.

2. The ESRC is the primary UK government funding body for the social sciences.

3. RES-000-22-0045. For further details, see http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/channelswimmer.

4. RES-000–22-3780. For further details, see http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/research/research_projects/designing_out_fatness/.

5. See, for example, http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/sociology/staff/academicstaff/throsby/homepage/channelswimmer/research/media/.

6. http://www.thelongswim.blogspot.com.

7. http://www.warwick.ac.uk/go/channelswimmer.